Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

What backup services would you use??

  • iCloud

    Votes: 4 80.0%
  • Google

    Votes: 1 20.0%

  • Total voters
    5

yumzone

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 15, 2019
8
1
Birmingham UK
Hi thank you for stopping by.

Ive tried searching for a response to my questions. No look solar.

  1. I have a iPhone X ... a MacBook ... & iPad Pro 11 inch, Im also getting the iWatch over the next few days.
  2. As I'm sure you can imagine i have collected a fair few photos on my iPhone mostly around 1000 to be precise
  3. What I want to do is upload the photos from my phone to iCloud and then delete them from my phone - i don't want to loose the photos i just want them to be secure on the cloud ??
  4. im doing something wrong as it says they will be removed in 18 days ...

Ive used google to back up my pictures the ones from my phone i just don't understand how it works. Where are they floating around cyber space.

If someone could tell me the best way to back up photos and what settings have to be what way ... I will be forever grateful.

Looking forward to heart from you all soon
 

mikzn

macrumors 68040
Sep 2, 2013
3,005
2,299
North Vancouver
I think you will get a lots of different opinions

I would vote for iCloud over Google - better integration

But my preference is to download all pictures form all iOS devices and cameras etc. to Photos and not to iCloud - then back that library up on a separate drive with Carbon Copy Cloner

I seen lots of threads where posters have lost all thier photos with a mix up on the cloud (ussually a bad sync) - if you have a "large amount of pictures" Photos is a pretty decent tool for managing and sorting and saving your pictures and its easy to save / sync some favorites back to the iPhone or iPad
 

jpn

Cancelled
Feb 9, 2003
1,854
1,988
hi

its great you are asking about backups.

for me, i have never considered iCloud to be a backup service.
to me, its only a syncing service.
delete on one device and its gone on all devices.

for me, iCloud is a backup in the sense that it is "info restore" only. in the sense that as long as you have turned on and subscribed to all iCloud services, then if you encounter a device failure, or you buy a new device, iCloud puts it all back nicely on a new device for you.

for what i call actual backups, i do it two ways.
1 i use Time Machine (which is automatic)
2 i manually drag my Documents folder and Photos folder and Library/Mail folder to a 2TB Sandisk Extreme USB-C flash drive SSD every 2 weeks or so.
 

MisterSavage

macrumors 601
Nov 10, 2018
4,860
5,761
You don't have to pick one. In fact, it's a good idea to have multiple backups of things you care about.

My system for photos:
  • Apple photo stream has my last 1000 photos
  • I copy my photos to my Mac
  • My Mac has a time machine backup to an external drive on my desk
  • My Mac is backed up online by Backblaze
  • All of my photos get uploaded to Google Photos

Ive used google to back up my pictures the ones from my phone i just don't understand how it works. Where are they floating around cyber space.

You get to them by going to photos.google.com in a browser or the Google Photos app on your phone.
 

NoBoMac

Moderator
Staff member
Jul 1, 2014
6,302
5,022
^^^Sorta same for me.

iPhone pics are few and far between, mostly shoot with DSLR, so iCloud is pretty unimportant for sync/save.

Pics are synced to Mac into Photos. Library is on an external SSD.

Once a quarter, photo library is copied to two different external HDDs.

Once a quarter, export new photos to my Amazon Drive.
 
  • Like
Reactions: MisterSavage
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.